iOS 5 Rumors: What New Features Will Apple Announce At WWDC 2011?

Apple announced on Tuesday that the highly anticipated WWDC 2011 will revolve around the company's new software offerings. The debut of a new cloud-based service (iCloud) will likely take center stage at the event. Upgrades to Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones, iPads, and the iPod touch (in the form of iOS 5) and Mac operating system (in the form of Mac OS X Lion) are expected to bring major changes, too.

What will iOS 5 look like?

According to TechCrunch, "completely revamped notifications and widgets" will be one of the biggest improvement that version 5 of Apple's iOS platform.Apple Insider notes that Apple has filed patents for "always-in-sync" widgets, which would be constantly refreshed so users may view information on the home screen at a glance. For example, an iOS 5 user may be able to view local weather conditions on Apple's weather app without having to open the app and wait for it to download new local data.

iOS 5 may also offer over-the-air upgrades, which will allow users to update their devices without connecting to a computer.

9to5Mac explains how this might work: "Updates are now over 600MB. Apple would have to make these smaller to get the carriers to agree to push these things as they are. We believe that Apple will make the updates much smaller by using incremental patches rather than full OS downloads."

If iOS 5 offers cloud-based updates, it might offer cloud-based backups. Outlining this theory, Ars Technica writes, "Since iTunes is also used to back up an iOS device before an update, it's likely that a service, like Apple's [...] iCloud, would be offered to back up data before applying OTA updates."

TechCrunch also reported previously that Apple had partnered with Nuance to bring smarter speech-recognition to future iOS releases, though this improvement may not affect the iOS 5's Voice Control feature.

What new features do you think Apple will include in the iOS 5 release? Let us know in the comments below.